World’s End by Joan D. Vinge Page B

And yet I had to reach
Fire
Lake
,
and I needed Ang to do it. I tried to tell myself
that once we found his treasure, I could convince the others to search for my
brothers in return for my share .... I tried not to
wonder what would happen if my share actually made me rich enough to buy back
the family estates myself.
    I started
to climb into the rover’s cab to take some readings, but Spadrin caught my arm, jerking me back and around.
    “What are
you really here for? It isn’t to get rich.” His hand probed the tendons of my
elbow and found a nerve.
    I gasped
and swore. “Damn you! I told you never to touch me—” My voice slid away from
me.
    “Or what?” Spadrin blocked my escape with his outstretched arm.
“You’ll report me? You’ll have me arrested? Who’s going to back you up? I’ll
tell you who.” He grinned. “No one, Blue. No one.” He stepped back, letting his arm drop. “It doesn’t
matter why you’re here, right now. When I really want to know, you’ll tell me;
just like Ang. Gedda .”
He spoke the word very softly, deliberately, before he walked away.
    I sat down
on the step of the cab. I sat there for a long time, staring at the desolation
that surrounded me. But my eyes saw snow, not stones, and a circle of
pale-faced barbarians with eyes the color of the sky. Tiamat’s sky; Tiamat’s people—the outlaws who had taken a
police inspector captive in the frozen wilderness outside Carbuncle, who had
degraded and tortured him .... The one called Taryd Roh , who had taught their
prisoner that pride was no defense against pain; who
knew how to use his hands the way Spadrin did. He had
used them on a man trapped like an animal in a cage ... a man who had begged,
who had wept, who had crawled to please him ... who would have done anything he
asked. Anything. But he didn’t want anything.
    Afterward,
the prisoner had taken the lid of a food can and slashed his own wrists.
    Death before dishonor. We drank the blood toast when I was
in school, and laughed. Suicide before shame: the code of our ancestors, a
testament to our integrity. We could laugh then. We were so young ... so sure
that none of us would ever know suffering or humiliation, never see our
humanity stripped naked, or our honor ground into the dirt ....
    “ Gedda ? Gedda !” I looked up, into Ang’s scowling face and the glare of the sun behind him. I shielded my eyes, trying
to hide my confusion.
    “Something wrong?” He was staring at me.
    I shook my
head. “No. No, I ...” I realized suddenly that my eyes were wet. I rubbed them
with my hand. “I got grit in my eye. Had to get it out—” I groped for the
canteen behind me.
    “You
finished?”
    “No,
goddamn it1 Leave me alone, let me do my job!”
    He grunted
and walked away again. I opened the canteen and gulped water, spilling it down
the front of my shirt; wasting it, not caring. It eased the knotted tightness
inside me, letting me breathe, letting me find the self-discipline to
concentrate on my work again.
    I wanted to
die, on Tiamat . I should have died—but I didn’t.
Gods, was I really spared by fate for this?

day 45.
    Ang is
leading us on a crazy chase. Sometimes I wonder , does
he really know where we’re going? If he does, then he must be trying to make
sure we can’t get back without him He still does virtually all the piloting,
when he can’t point one of us at some distant landmark and tell us to aim for
it. He won’t give us any bearings.
    We’ve long
since left the mountains behind, and the plain of stones. The rover continues
to carry us along, the gods know how; running on instinct, like Ang , maybe. I hold my breath every morning. My hands are
raw with cuts and blisters from the repair work; sometimes I can barely handle
my tools.
    We’ve
crossed long-dead sea floor, crushing the skeleton shells of a million tiny
nameless creatures; floundered through mineral deposits like new-fallen snow,
beds the Company hasn’t even begun to think about